"Ruling in a bitterly contested case with national ramifications, a federal judge found Thursday that the Waterkeeper Alliance failed to prove that an Eastern Shore farm's chicken houses were polluting a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay."

"U.S. District Court Judge William M. Nickerson declared in a 50-page opinion that the New York-based environmental group had not established in a two-week trial in October that waste from chicken houses owned by Berlin farmers Alan and Kristin Hudson was fouling a drainage ditch that ultimately flows to the Pocomoke River.

He also rejected arguments that Perdue, the Salisbury-based poultry company for whom the Hudsons raise birds, should share responsibility for any pollution because of its tight oversight of contract chicken growers."